[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 04/56] anv/entrypoints: Generalize the string map a bit

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 8:45 AM, Dylan Baker <dylan at pnwbakers.com> wrote:

> Quoting Jason Ekstrand (2018-03-07 20:22:51)
> > Yes, that is what happened.  That said, wrote that patch in September and
> > you've had about 6 months to look at it.  The only particularly active
> Mesa
> > contributor who hasn't had access is Ilia.
>
> No, just no. Having a patch in a branch does not count, especially not in a
> closed branch. I have plenty of patches that have sat in branches for
> months,
> years even. You're saying it's okay for me to send them to the list and
> push
> them a couple hours later because I wrote them a long time ago?


No, that's not what I'm saying.  However, I think there's a difference
between a private branch that you've had sitting around for a while and a
mostly public branch that you've been pestering your coworkers to review
for the past 6 months and gotten zero takers.  Every single patch I sent
had been reviewed and many of them by multiple people.

This is something that we as a community (and team) need to sort out.  With
both hardware enabling and new extension work, we are working with
embargoes.  Sometimes large pieces of work go into enabling said hardware
and features.  This series was fairly small at 56 patches; If you look at
all of Vulkan 1.1, it's probably more like 500.  If we wait until it's
public to get code review, you may be looking at weeks or months before you
can land it.

This problem is only getting worse now that the mesa project is getting
caught up on features.  It used to be that we could do basically everything
publicly because we were several whole GL versions behind and basically
zero feature work was embargoed.  The only people working with an embargo
were people doing hardware enabling and they were sending the patches out
months before the hardware was available to anyone so waiting a week or two
doesn't matter.  Now, basically everything we do that isn't refactoring or
optimization work has to happen behind closed doors.  It's unfortunate, but
it's also reality.

How do we deal with that as an open-source community?  That's a good
question and one which I'm happy to discuss.  I'm not sure what the right
balance is here but the "it doesn't exist until it's public" model just
isn't fair to the people who are in the unfortunate circumstance of working
under an embargo.

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 10:37 AM, Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> wrote:

> On 2018-03-08 06:10 PM, Dylan Baker wrote:
> >
> > When I was given commit access I was told that I should wait 24 hours
> > after sending patches unless they were trivial or fixed something
> > critical, ie, without them you can't compile or nothing works.
>
> FWIW, I think that's a good rule, and I follow it.
>
> If one doesn't wait for at least 24 hours, e.g. somebody living in a
> different timezone may not get a chance to send feedback before the
> patch is applied. So it's kind of implying one isn't interested in
> feedback from such people.
>

I agree.  24 hours means one turn of the globe and pushing much faster than
that does sort-of imply that you don't care about that feedback.  In this
case, the only thing that's implied is that I don't care too much about
feedback from the 5% of the mesa community who doesn't have a Khronos
account.  Maybe that makes me a jerk, but I didn't think it did.


> > I know we've always given a lot of flexibility to vendor specific code
> > (i965 or nouveau), but you hope everyone can understand my frustration
> > with a 56 patch series that I sent review for 8 hours after it was
> > posted to the list and I got told "Oh, I merged that hours ago,
> > patches welcome."
>
> I can. I guess Jason got a bit carried away by the Vulkan 1.1 excitement.
>

Perhaps.  :-)  I do think that being there day-1 is important.  If nothing
else, it shows the rest of the graphics community (who already fears the
concept of open-source) that working in the open isn't going to cramp their
style.  If we can deliver full-featured and fully conformant Vulkan 1.1
drivers on day 1, then they can to.  I think that's an important message
for the open-source community to send.

--Jason
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